A01=James Robert Wood
abstracion
anecdote
animal spirits
astronomer
Author_James Robert Wood
being
Carl Linnaeus
Category=DSB
control
critique
diversity
empiricism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Europeans
experiments
gender
human nature
intellectual
king of England
laws
lived experience
logic
lying
lyric poetry
monarch
philosophy
planets
plants
poetry
rational
reason
religion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
science
sentience
spirituality
story
Thomas Jefferson
travel
voyager
Product details
- ISBN 9780813942209
- Weight: 530g
- Dimensions: 210 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jul 2019
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Anecdotes of Enlightenment is the first literary history of the anecdote in English. In this wide-ranging account, James Robert Wood explores the animating effects anecdotes had on intellectual and literary cultures over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research and emphasizing the anecdote as a way of thinking, he shows that an intimate relationship developed between the anecdote and the Enlightenment concept of human nature. Anecdotes drew attention to odd phenomena on the peripheries of human life and human history. Enlightenment writers developed new and often contentious ideas of human nature through their efforts to explain these anomalies. They challenged each other's ideas by reinterpreting each other's anecdotes and by telling new anecdotes in turn.
Anecdotes of Enlightenment features careful readings of the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume; the periodical essays of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood; the travel narratives of Joseph Banks, James Cook, and James Boswell; the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Written in an engaging style and spotlighting the eccentric aspects of Enlightenment thought, this fascinating book will appeal to historians, philosophers, and literary critics interested in the intellectual culture of the long eighteenth century.
Anecdotes of Enlightenment features careful readings of the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume; the periodical essays of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood; the travel narratives of Joseph Banks, James Cook, and James Boswell; the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Written in an engaging style and spotlighting the eccentric aspects of Enlightenment thought, this fascinating book will appeal to historians, philosophers, and literary critics interested in the intellectual culture of the long eighteenth century.
James Robert Wood is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia.
